The Future of Web Conferencing: Extensibility

While many think of web conferencing as simple screen sharing — sharing PowerPoint and “passing the ball” from one presenter to the next—that’s a limited interaction that hasn’t changed much in 10 years.

In contrast, we’re seeing organizations expanding what they’re doing and what they expect from online meeting solutions. Beyond simple screen sharing, they’re enabling more effective collaboration, supporting a range of use cases throughout their enterprises, and in some cases, managing highly specialized interactions such as guided selling, telemedicine and cross-border disaster recovery coordination – to name a few.

We’re glad to be right there with them, helping support and lead this movement toward a broad and rapidly growing range of more advanced use cases. We’ve taken an open approach with our product development over time and focused efforts on creating a rich, flexible solution that integrates well with other systems and is highly extensible. Our APIs, free SDKs and other developer resources encourage development and enable customization. We encourage you to read on for more about our perspective on extensibility, our ecosystem that’s growing around it, what a few of our customers have accomplished, and how you can get your hands on the latest and greatest.

Market Trend – Customization

In this video, Arun Anantharaman, our VP and GM of Adobe Connect (@arunster), discusses overarching trends in web conferencing including increasing demands for customization and solutions that integrate with other systems.

Extensions Ecosystem

We’ve built out a unique extensions ecosystem. Looking at the image below, dark blue represents areas where ours is the only solution that provides such extensions, and light blue where we’re one of few that offer the capabilities. Several vendors, including Adobe, provide integrations to other systems and mobile support.

Adobe Technologies: utilization of Adobe technologies including Flash and AIR

For more information and to download the very latest, see our extensions and integrations page here.

Customer Uses

The extensibility of Adobe Connect is a direct response to the real-world requirements of customers — the need to solve unique business problems, and to have personalized experiences. Here are a few great examples:

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations agency, uses Adobe Connect and a specialized extension from our partner, RefinedData to support simultaneous interpretation, allowing multi-lingual, interactive remote online meeting participation; see their press release

The California State University Chancellor’s Office has standardized on Adobe Connect and in-meeting extensions to improve collaboration with rich video and save travel expense while lightening environmental impact; check out their story here

A high-profile political event recently incorporated our TwitterConnect custom pod in its Adobe Connect large-scale webinar solution to include conversation with supporters and elevate community building

Developers

The Adobe Connect Developer Center has the free SDKs, APIs and learning materials developers need to get started extending capabilities; additional resources include tutorials and a forum.

Looking Forward

We have many customers using Adobe Connect in conjunction with key extensions to realize value today. And we’re definitely looking forward to what the creativity of developers and our customers brings to bear as we move forward. Please do stay in touch.